Outer Darkness is a low-budget horror/SF digest with some good fiction and oddly out-of-place artwork.

The editors have done a laudable job of pulling in good contributions from small press "names" like Cathy Buburuz and Denise Sodaro, but Stayer mars the fiction with his juvenile cartoon chronicles like "The Egg Files: From the Official Records of Marshal I.M. Egg." The overly cutesy art tends to distract from the fiction when it's placed in the midst of horror stories like Bryan Lindenberger's "The Greatest Power," a little swamp horror piece that opens with a hand reaching out of a pool of black muck to grab a boy's poking stick. L.P. Van Ness' "Amaranth" follows the tale of an "artistic" vampiress, Denise Sodaro offers a humorous twist on the "Easy Money" to be made when ghostbusters team up with one of their haunts and J. Michael Major provides a touch of SF in "Under His Skin," a corporate espionage story involving skin-embedded chips and junkies. Two huge segments of the magazine are devoted to a serial SF novel OD started publishing in its first issue. Not wanting to start in the middle, I can't comment.

If OD can outgrow its high school newspaper artwork and editorials (what self-respecting editors refer to themselves as "Keithy and Jeffy"?) it could grow into a nifty little fiction forum.

-- John Everson

Copyright © 1996 by John Everson. All Rights Reserved.